MiFID II Overview: Key Rules and the Digital Tools Driving Compliance

Between December 2018 and December 2023, Sigma Broking Limited submitted 924,584 incorrect MiFID II transaction reports to UK regulators. Nearly every trade the London-based firm executed during that five-year period was reported incorrectly under the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II framework. The FCA fined Sigma £1,087,300 in February 2025, marking the firm’s second enforcement action for similar failures. The first came in October 2022 when regulators discovered Sigma had failed to report 56,000 transactions entirely.

The mistakes stemmed from incorrect system setup and weak reporting processes during implementation. Yet Sigma’s case illustrates a broader challenge facing thousands of European financial institutions: meeting the technical demands of MiFID II while managing operational complexity and escalating regulatory scrutiny.

What MiFID II Demands

MiFID II came into effect on 3 January 2018, overhauling how European markets operate. The directive applies to investment firms including brokers, dealers and asset managers, alongside trading venues, exchanges and market operators. Its three pillars address investor protection, market transparency and enhanced reporting standards.

The most technically demanding requirement centres on transaction reporting. Under Article 26(1) of UK MiFIR, firms must report transactions by close of the following working day. Reports comprise up to 65 XML fields, a dramatic increase from 23 fields under the original MiFID. These reports must capture comprehensive details: information about the financial instrument, quantity and price, buyer and seller details, and the decision makers behind each transaction across all asset classes.

Article 26(7) limits how reports can be submitted. Investment firms can report directly to the FCA’s Market Data Processor, use an Approved Reporting Mechanism acting on their behalf, or rely on trading venues submitting on behalf of entities executing through their systems. Firms remain responsible for completeness, accuracy and timeliness even when using third parties.

Beyond Transaction Reporting

Best execution requirements demand firms take all sufficient steps to achieve the best trading result for clients. This marked an increase from the “reasonable steps” standard under MiFID I, forcing firms to demonstrate more rigorous processes.

The directive also mandates comprehensive record keeping. Firms must record, monitor and archive phone calls, emails, video conferences and instant messages for seven years. This enables regulators to reconstruct events surrounding trades and verify firms acted in clients’ best interests.

The Cost of Getting It Wrong

Sigma’s independent review confirmed the extent of failures in February 2025. But financial penalties represent only part of the compliance burden. Before MiFID II took effect, industry estimates suggested firms would spend approximately $2.1 billion on compliance preparations during 2017, with around $700 million dedicated specifically to transaction and trade reporting by asset managers and investment banks. For many buy-side firms, transaction reporting became their single most expensive technology investment.

The operational challenges compound financial costs. Firms must coordinate data across multiple systems and counterparties while meeting tight submission deadlines. When a UK broker failed to submit more than 46,000 single-stock CFD transaction reports between October 2022 and March 2023, the FCA fined it just under £100,000. What made the case particularly damaging was timing: the broker had identified its failure following a third-party review but did not proactively report the breach to the FCA. Regulators independently identified the discrepancy, demonstrating the expectation that firms must notify authorities immediately when discovering reporting failures.

In 2024, the FCA imposed £176 million in fines on financial firms, a 230% increase from £53.4 million in 2023. The regulator’s message is clear: material and systemic regulatory breaches will not be tolerated.

The Evolution Continues

The regulatory landscape keeps moving. The 2024 review package, known as MiFID III and MiFIR 2, introduces significant changes including an EU-wide consolidated tape, a ban on payment-for-order-flow, and a single volume cap. These amendments take effect from late 2025 and early 2026, representing the most significant updates to EU financial markets infrastructure since the original implementation.

The European Securities and Markets Authority began drafting new delegated acts in summer 2024, with completion expected by late 2025. This timeline gives firms breathing room to upgrade compliance infrastructure before requirements become enforceable.

Transaction Reporting: The ARM Solution

Financial institutions increasingly deploy Approved Reporting Mechanisms to manage their obligations. UnaVista, London Stock Exchange Group’s global platform, assists firms with over 8 billion transaction reports annually for EMIR and MiFIR across all asset classes. The platform provides smart validation using internal and external reference data sources, management information dashboards and tools to identify recurring errors before regulators flag them.

Euronext’s Transaction Reporting Service connects to all major European regulators including AMF, AFM, FCA, FSMA, CMVM and Consob. The service publishes trades and quotes according to requirements and sends transaction reports to relevant authorities in appropriate format and timeframe.

Bloomberg’s Trade Order Management Solutions received FCA approval to report securities with an ISIN and OTC derivatives. The platform integrates transaction reporting directly via the trade ticket, eliminating manual re-keying and file conversions. This integration addresses one of the core problems that caught out Sigma Broking: reducing over-reporting and under-reporting through automated validation.

For smaller operations, platforms like WealthKernel integrate directly with the FCA’s Market Data Processor portal, performing transaction reporting for all securities executed on its platform. This allows tenants to enter transmission agreements at no additional cost, reducing the compliance burden for firms without large technology budgets.

Quality Assurance and Reconciliation

Specialist platforms handle the validation challenge regulators expect firms to address. Qomply’s ReportAssure platform performs quality assurance, accuracy, timeliness and completeness checks for transaction reports under MiFID II, EMIR and SFTR. The platform delivers comprehensive arsenals of accuracy checks powered by proprietary assurance engines, catching errors before submission.

Cappitech provides automated generation of regulatory reports and reconciliation services. The platform handles multiple jurisdictions and offers three-way reconciliation to validate reporting data against front-office records and regulator feedback. These reconciliations take seconds, returning detailed lists of matches and mismatches that enable rapid error correction.

MarketAxess provides a single platform for all transaction reporting regulations, featuring a rules engine that ingests, formats and filters raw transaction data into reports. The system offers self-directed access to five to seven years of historic transaction reports with quick exception identification. This historical access proves crucial when regulators request information about past trades during investigations.

SteelEye’s platform enables firms to conduct three-way reconciliation by comparing their original files against data received by National Competent Authorities and ARMs. This catches discrepancies that might otherwise trigger the kind of enforcement action Sigma Broking faced.

Reference Data: The Foundation Layer

Reference data providers supply the accurate instrument identifiers and static data that underpin compliant reporting. ICE Data Services provides MiFID II-specific data solutions that generate eligibility flags and a range of data standards, including CFI codes, LEIs and information on underlying instruments. The platform dynamically assesses conditions underpinning transaction reporting eligibility, including venues where instruments trade and thorough global assessment of ISINs with underlying instruments.

Bloomberg’s comprehensive solutions suite integrates seamlessly with Trade Order Management Solutions and Asset and Investment Manager platforms, providing strategic enterprise workflow across the entire trade lifecycle from pre-trade to post-trade. The Voice Taker Workflow links execution management systems, messaging systems and trade confirmation systems to create seamless workflows for voice execution off-venue with full audit trails.

S&P Global offers reference data, transaction cost analysis and best execution benchmarking tools. The platform enables firms to conduct sophisticated benchmarking, manage research evaluation and utilization processes, and efficiently manage regulatory outreach with counterparties.

Communications Surveillance

MiFID II’s record-keeping obligations extend beyond transaction data to all relevant communications. NICE’s NTR-X provides assurance that all regulated employees and communication devices they use are being recorded, while SURVEIL-X Communication provides comprehensive surveillance coverage for all communication modalities including email, chat, video and voice. These solutions ensure firms can reconstruct trades from recorded conversations and digital interactions, meeting the seven-year retention requirement.

Mimecast provides cloud-based email archiving and compliance monitoring. The platform enables firms to search communications rapidly, demonstrating compliance status within seconds. It integrates with Microsoft Exchange and Office 365, providing threat intelligence for widely-used email platforms while maintaining immutable archives with compliance-driven chains of custody.

ASC Technologies offers AI-powered recording and compliance management tailored for financial institutions. The platform provides compliance phrase spotting to identify mandatory statements and alert omissions, auto-categorization according to compliance relevance with appropriate retention periods, and real-time risk alerting to filter entire communication streams and flag potential issues automatically.

Built-In Compliance

Modern trading platforms build compliance directly into workflow, addressing problems at source rather than through post-trade validation. Trading Technologies’ platform includes microsecond-level precision timestamps and the ability for users to populate required fields across front-end interfaces and FIX applications. Administrators can control and lock down fields to minimize errors, the kind of system-level controls that could have prevented Sigma’s five-year reporting failure.

Eurobase’s Siena platform offers comprehensive regulatory reporting under MiFIR and EMIR frameworks. Siena provides end-of-day transaction reporting with connectivity to all major UK and EU ARMs and regulators, plus real-time trade reporting with connectivity to all major UK and EU APAs and regulators. The platform includes complete audit trails and trade reconstruction capability.

The Strategic Advantage

Sigma Broking’s case demonstrates what happens when compliance becomes an afterthought rather than a strategic priority. The firm relied on a single individual to manually identify which financial instruments were reportable when new business commenced. It did not put in place any steps to scrutinize this process or any checks to ensure correct trades had been identified as reportable.

By contrast, financial institutions that embed specialized compliance technology gain operational advantages beyond avoiding regulatory penalties. Automated reporting reduces error rates and processing times. Integrated platforms provide visibility across all transaction data through single interfaces, enabling firms to identify trends and common issues before they trigger regulatory attention.

Management information tools within platforms like UnaVista enable anonymized peer-to-peer analysis and industry benchmarking. Firms can compare their reporting quality against real industry benchmarks, identifying areas requiring improvement before regulators flag deficiencies. This proactive approach stands in stark contrast to reactive responses following regulatory investigations.

Looking Forward

As MiFID evolves toward its next iteration, compliance infrastructure becomes increasingly sophisticated. The directive’s emphasis on transparency and investor protection continues to shape market behavior. Yet the gap between firms with robust compliance systems and those struggling with inadequate processes grows wider.

Organizations investing in sophisticated compliance platforms position themselves not merely to meet current obligations but to adapt swiftly as regulatory demands evolve. The convergence of automated reporting, communications surveillance and data analytics creates comprehensive compliance frameworks capable of handling future changes without the kind of systemic failures that destroyed Sigma Broking’s compliance record.

For financial institutions operating in European markets, the lesson is clear: compliance technology represents strategic infrastructure, not discretionary spending. Firms that recognize this reality before regulators come calling turn potential vulnerabilities into competitive advantages.